Heather DeHaan, Binghamton University, author of Stalinist City Planning:
Christina E. Crawford presents the Soviet spatial revolution as a process rather than as a series of political ruptures, and her theoretical and terminological richness promises to reshape the fields of architecture and urban history.
Jean-Louis Cohen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University:
Christina Crawford's brilliant, path-breaking book fundamentally renews knowledge of the interrelations between avant-garde strategies and urban developments in the first fifteen years of Bolshevik power. She has mapped the political networks and the professional cultures at play and unveiled how concretely planned—or not—the socialist economy was.
Crawford has produced an eloquently written and subtly argued book that willnd a wide audience among architecture historians, planning historians, urban historians, historians of the Soviet Union, and many others.
SPATIAL REVOLUTION IS A PARALLEL STORY OF THEORETICAL debates and the physical realisation of socialist space-making in the early Soviet Union
Christina E. Crawford's rich and engaging new monograph, and its deep examination of the internal dynamics of Soviet urbanism — in particular, the way plans were framed, cultivated and put into practice — makes the existence of uniquely Soviet spatial politics clear.
Spatial Revolution examines the first fifteen years of Soviet architecture and planning in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv—three economically central cities where early socialist architecture and planning first took shape in the built environment.
Crawford's skillful handling of technical detail ensures that Spatial Revolution remains accessible for nonspecialists, allowing it to provide a valuable entry point into this area for scholars and students of cognate disciplines. Perhaps most important, the work highlights the fact that the lessons from these revolutionary efforts to materialize environments based on principles of livability, social equity, and sustainability have significant currency for us today.
Spatial Revolution is an expertly written and beautifully crafted book that reshapes conversations about early Soviet architecture and planning. The book is of interest not just to urban and architectural historians, but to scholars of the Soviet period broadly.
Christina Crawford's richly illustrated Spatial Revolution provides a fascinating view into the distinctive, experimental, often ad hoc, yet globally connected development of Soviet planning and housing strategies in the 1920s and 1930s.
One can discern the outlines of a framework for the study of socialism that is not caught up in the tired paradigm of an oscillation between brilliant utopias and their mundane failures, but rather one that sees in the evolution of plans and meta-plans a version of the flexibility and adaptation often thought to be absent from state socialism.
The contribution of Spatial Revolution to the history of socialism and Soviet architecture is remarkable for the scope of covered topics and the method chosen by its author.
Crawford brilliantly showcases the materiality of the planning process. Her skills as licensed architect are on full display as she walks readers through planners' maps, travel notes, cartograms and similar documents, using these to produce a lived and practised genealogy of socialist design.
Open Access
